We always invest some considerable amount of time in
preparing our development environment. Also, this is one of the repetitive tasks
if there are some new developers joining the team. In addition to this, these
days there are large number of new software getting released everyday apart from
number of new software updates for the existing software. Also, most of the
times, these installations have large number of dependencies which needs to be
installed as pre-requisites before installing the actual package. Considering
these things, there are some complexities involved in managing these activities.
For example, finding if the component is already installed, downloading, finding
and installing the dependencies, installing the actual component and configuring
it. It will be great and useful if this process is automated. This is what Web
Platform installer (shortly called as WebPI) does.

Another good thing about
WebPI is, it also supports command line installation of the products in dev
environments.

Let’s see more about this tool in next sections.

What is Web Platform Installer (WebPI)?

It is a free tool offered by Microsoft that automates
the process of preparing the web development environment. It can be thought as
some sort of download manager but WebPI as such is functionally more than that.
Apart from downloading the packages, it even takes care of installing it with
their dependencies and also configuring it. It also enables us to install some
of the open source and free products like PHP, My SQL and other applications
like wordpress, joomla, BlogEngine.Net, etc apart from the products of Microsoft
web stack.

How it works?

The Web platform Installer will initially check your
computer to get the status of installed products and will provide us the option
to install the products that are not installed. It also allows us to select
multiple products at a time and install it in a shot.

The latest version as of this writing is 3.0. After
installation, you can launch WebPI from Start menu. The WebPI will gather
information about the installed products on your system and will load the UI
with options to add new packages. Refer below,

This will change the Add button to Remove and enable
Install button at bottom of the screen. Once you click install, you will be
presented with EULA screen (End User Agreement screen), click I Agree. That’s
it! This will make the WebPI to download and Install wordpress on your system.

In next section, we will see how to use the command line
WebPI application to find and install the components.

Using WebPI in Command Prompt

WebPI provides an option where we can find the products
and install it through the command prompt. You can.

3.Open the command prompt as
Admin. Type cmd in Start>Run. In Vista and Windows 7, Start > type cmd in
search box. Now right click the command prompt > Click Run as administrator.
Refer the below figure.

4.Navigate to the folder where
you have unzipped the content of the WebPI command line application.

WebPI is a one of the needed and very useful addition to
our existing software stack. Clearly, WebPI tool will reduce the developer time
in managing their development environment to have the latest products installed.